Year's Best SF 15 - By David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

Introduction

The year 2009 began with some layoffs and firings in publishing, but not many affecting SF. Still, some SF people lost their jobs. The really good news is that SF and fantasy sales held up throughout the year for most publishing lines in spite of comparative disasters in other areas of publishing. But it was for the most part not a year of expansion and commercial ambition.

The year 2010 is announced as one of economic recovery, and we certainly hope that is the case. In publishing, that means mostly holding the line, not growth. Several online venues for fantasy and SF, including the ambitious Baen’s Universe, have announced closings in early 2010. At least one of them, Internet Review of SF, has said they can no longer afford to lose money and that they see no way to break even, never mind profit.

Marketing genres associated with fantasy, paranormal romance, vampire and zombie books for teenagers, and “urban fantasy” were notably successful in 2009. One might even claim that F&SF expanded in 2009, but that would require ignoring that fact that the associated genres are not notable for much variation from the commercial formulas of the horror or romance genres; they are about feelings more than thought or knowledge.

The general quality of SF short fiction was no less in 2009, but from our vantage point there was a lot of SF with thinly-painted settings as backdrops for their characters, and in which not much happened. Sometimes, at least, this was done with style and sophistication, but not actually often enough for us to praise this trend.

The electronic book was hysterically discussed and promoted all year, but the sales of electronic text did not increase to as high as 4 percent of any major publisher’s income. Ian Randal Strock of SF Scope reported double-digit sales on his electronic “bestseller.” So print is still the principal venue for SF and fantasy in terms of economics for writers and for publishers. Bless my soul, someone even mentioned publically that Amazon.com might be inflating its sales claims for electronic books or Kindle readers. Its figures are of course secret.

And there was a scandal when it was discovered that one could lose an electronic book that one had bought if the seller decided it must take it back—and how easily it could be done with, in this case, a book by George Orwell. Welcome to the cloud where you don’t actually own, but just lease or license.

We are reminded of the feudal system, where we serfs don’t actually own the property. The lords own it. It is the stuff of paranoid SF novels. They can come into your computer or reader or phone and delete. That information is no longer, as President Nixon once said of his previous statement of fact, operative. 1984, anyone?

The magazines and original anthologies published a lot of good fiction but appeared to be commercially hard-pressed (with the occasional anthologies of vampire, zombie, and fantasy romance fiction the exception). Delivery and distribution bankruptcies hurt magazines and mass market books most of all. Trade paperbacks have been forced into prominence but costs, and therefore prices, are rising. This was also the year of the oversized ten-dollar ($9.99) mass market paperback. And of the highly discounted bestseller—at least four major retailers were selling select bestsellers at less than they paid for them. There was a good analysis of this in The New Yorker, showing who it would hurt (bookstores) and how.

And perhaps most important, this was the year that Google attempted to establish that it could violate copyright with impunity; 2010 will be the year that that happens, or doesn’t. It is still in court.

Yet we still offer cautious optimism for the SF field. A lot of what has grown up on the internet in the last decade depends on the free time of employed people, or the free time generated by a person with a job in the household, and maybe even some of the household discretionary spending or borrowing. Some of that free time and money (and optimism) has evaporated, along with trillions of dollars from the national economies of the developed countries. So we look forward to creativity on a shoestring and less sleep.

There are still three professional magazines that publish SF, and several online venues that pay more than a token for fiction. However, much of the new fiction of high quality is showcased in original anthologies these days, and they are the source for just about half the wordage in